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Sunday, November 06, 2016

"The new book The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains In A High-Tech World makes the case for managing the tsunami of digital distractions to aid how we learn, absorb information and live." according to Eric Westervelt, Education Correspondent.

Maybe the smart phone's hegemony makes perfect evolutionary sense:
Humans are tapping a deep urge to seek out information. Our ancient
food-foraging survival instinct has evolved into an info-foraging
obsession; one that prompts many of us today to constantly check our
phones and multitask.

Our friends at NPR's Shots blog
recently spoke with one of the authors about distraction's impact on
productivity. I wanted to talk with Dr. Gazzaley about what his research
tells us about teaching, learning, studying and screen time in the age
of digital distraction.

From food foragers to
information foragers. Mechanisms that developed in our brain for
survival have now evolved to include information foraging?Correct.
We see it in other primates and we believe that this is sort of a
hijacking or an evolution of that same system that was critical for our
survival in terms of seeking out food has now been directed at seeking
out information.

Adam, we engage this info-foraging, this distraction even when that behavior is self-destructive or counterproductive?Yes, some behaviors that drive us, like even addictive behaviors,
might have some positive reward reinforcement and then many other
negative consequences.

One of the main theses we explore in the
book is our ability, or really remark-ability, to set high-level goals,
which is in many ways the pinnacle of the human brain. These goals are
complex, and this ability collides with very fundamental limitations in
the skills that we have to enact these goals. We call those abilities
cognitive control. We describe it in the book as a triad of: attention,
working memory and goal management, which includes multi-tasking and
task switching.

When we switch between tasks, we suffer a
degradation of performance that then could impact every aspect of our
cognition from our emotional regulation to our decision making to our
learning process, as well as real world activities like school and work
and safety on the road.Read more... Source: NPR andThe MIT Press Channel (YouTube)

2
comments:

From what I know, the information seeking evolved as a sort of mental tool allowing us to find food in the first place, not news, cats or celebrity gossip.

But the evolutionary psychologists say it's hard-wired, definitely.There is a sort of evolution lag. "Ancient minds and brains in current world". Exactly. Same was with high carbohydrate and fat food. The module motivating humans to seek it out was a great advantage when there wasn't much around. But that was a long time ago. And in the meantime, the McDonald's kicked in. And now people can't resist themselves from devouring it. Some people ask, why can’t other people just resists themselves. Here’s how humans still don’t know who they themselves are.

Same thing I guess happened to us in terms of information seeking.There is another book you might find interesting, Hegle - Jonathan Crary's 24/7.A bit different perspective, definitely, but also discusses current attention-based economy. If you find it interesting, I'd love to hear your thoughts!

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About Me

Hello, my name is Helge Scherlund and I am the Education Editor and Online Educator of this personal weblog and the founder of eLearning • Computer-Mediated Communication Center.
I have an education in the teaching adults and adult learning from Roskilde University, with Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and Human Resource Development (HRD) as specially studied subjects. I am the author of several articles and publications about the use of decision support tools, e-learning and computer-mediated communication. I am a member of The Danish Mathematical Society (DMF), The Danish Society for Theoretical Statistics (DSTS) and an individual member of the European Mathematical Society (EMS). Note: Comments published here are purely my own and do not reflect those of my current or future employers or other organizations.